The ‘junior’ team owned by Red Bull supremo Dietrich Mateschitz has tended to be a ‘revolving door’ over recent seasons – for drivers in particular. The ever-changing line-up of young hotshots must be bewildering for the technical staff, but they take most things with good cheer.
Scuderia Toro Rosso was, after all, born from the ashes of Minardi: the Formula One minnow that fans the world over took to their hearts. Based in Faenza, a comparative stone’s throw away from the hallowed Ferrari factory in Maranello, Giancarlo Minardi first entered Formula One in the mid-1970s running talented young drivers in Ferrari cars.
Minardi became a constructor in 1985 and spent 20 years competing on budgets of just a fraction spent by the front-running outfits. Nevertheless at the end of 2005, Minardi elected to call time on the operation and sold out to Mateschitz, who needed a final proving ground for the young and talented drivers he had been nurturing for almost a decade.
Among the many youngsters to have competed with the team, the stand-out performance was that of Sebastian Vettel in the 2008 Italian Grand Prix. Having qualified brilliantly on the front row, he went on to put in a faultless – even dominant – performance which brought raw emotion throughout the sport, as Toro Rosso crossed the line to take victory in its home event.
Initially Toro Rosso was equipped with chassis based very closely on existing Red Bull Racing designs – until such practices were outlawed. From within the little Faenza factory, catching up to the levels of technology and experience needed to create a modern car took time and there has seldom been the equipment needed to reproduce Vettel’s amazing victory.
Nonetheless 2012 has seen the team arrive with an extremely competent looking machine and a fast pairing in Australia’s Daniel Ricciardo and Frenchman Jean-Eric Vergne.